Good morning. I sat in on a webinar yesterday where an OpenAI exec casually mentioned that his entire department works with an AI agent—and the more I listened, the clearer it became that the tool was almost beside the point. The real story is what OpenAI’s finance team is being asked to become.
The finance department increasingly has the mandate to help leadership act while the outcome can still change. Within OpenAI’s finance department, led by CFO Sarah Friar, there is a strategic finance team that functions as a cross-functional partner to product, partnerships, engineering, and go-to-market teams. The team’s tool of choice is ChatGPT Work, an agent that can act across apps and files, stay on a task for hours, and turn a goal into a finished product.
